For a number of openSUSE releases now, on a periodic basis (monthly, it seems?) both my laptop and my desktop take forever to start. During this time, the hard disk activity is going berserk. When inspecting this with “iotop”, a process called “preload” or “start_preload” is hammering the disk, sometimes up to 10 minutes.
The irony is when you research “preload”, you find mostly articles like “drastically speed up your Linux system with preload”- I sometimes think it has to do with running VMs on these machines and maybe it’s trying to cache those large disk images? Pure speculation, but I can’t seem to find any documentation on this.
Anyway, I did finally find a way to turn this thing off. WARNING: since I do not know exactly what preload does and whether your machine becomes unusable if you turn it off, please only follow these instructions at your own risk.
Since preload seems to be a very low-level system/service, I did not want to risk uninstalling it. What I did instead was:
Yast2 - System Services (RunLevel)
Click the Expert Mode radio button
Scroll down to the boot.startpreload entry
Uncheck the “B” checkbox
Click OK and let Yast2 save the changes
Reboot
Since I applied these steps, no long boot times with insane hard disk activity has occurred and I also have not noticed anything else complaining or not working with this service off.
I don’t remember the details, but I think there was an update on preload that accompanied the kernel update.
My KDE session is still slow starting, but when I check the process list I don’t see preload as a problem. I suspect that the delays are now due to pulse audio. I have set “no audio output” in the System Notification Configuration on my laptop, but I haven’t used it enough since that change to be certain of the effect.
On 05/11/2011 04:36 PM, bsilvereagle wrote:
>
> Every X boots your disc gets checked for bad sectors, it’s just a Linux
> thing. However, “preload” doesn’t seem like the name for a disc check.
Not bad sectors - the file system is checked for consistency using fsck. Yes,
fsck can check for bad sectors, but that check is never run without you doing so.
Isn’t that the weird part? I thought I was the only one with this problem, because I couldn’t find any posts or Web articles. Could it be openSUSE specific? I have noticed that there is an AppArmor - preload link somewhere and isn’t AppArmore a Novell thing?
What really stung me is that this problem is such as “Windows-like” problem: unknown, phantom processes that hog the hard-drive and prevent a normal user experience or create long boot times. The “unknown” part is the most annoying part. If I knew what purpose it has, I would have been able to live with it.
I can’t really say what windows does or does not do, I do know it has a habit of filling the system tray will bucket loads of processes, but I think you can switch to selective startup. Actually, it might be the software that decides to have a process running in the background and not be a windows fault so much.
Typically this is not the same in Linux and the user has much more control over apps startup etc than in windows.
And I don’t know if windows uses a similar process to ‘Preload’ or not. But I don’t see this as a windows like problem, but more likely a hardware issue we are experiencing. As Preload is installed on my R61 and G550 with no issues.
Maybe, but my 1 yr old Toshiba (2.13GHz Core i3 M330 8GB RAM) had the issue. As I mentioned before, my only circumstantial evidence seems to be that it starts popping up after having hosted virtual machines, which use big VDI files. I run VMs regularly on this laptop. But the hogging starts only after a fresh reboot, before I run any VMs.
On 2011-05-12 17:06, twelveeighty wrote:
>
> caf4926;2338583 Wrote:
>> I uninstalled that too
>
> What really stung me is that this problem is such as “Windows-like”
> problem: unknown, phantom processes that hog the hard-drive and prevent
> a normal user experience or create long boot times. The “unknown” part
> is the most annoying part. If I knew what purpose it has, I would have
> been able to live with it.
Preload is documented and you can find out what it does.
> man sysctl
(search for preload - no match found)
> man sysctl.conf
This man page basically says: it’s the config file for sysctl.conf. No explanation on what preload does.
OK, let’s look inside sysctl.conf, maybe that will explain what preload does. This file has entries on ipv4 / ipv6 settings. No clue what it does, but it certainly doesn’t explain what preload does.
You can also search this forum and save time:
Re: /dev full due to preloadtrace.log
Re: Something weird happening with preload
Interesting, but neither of those two posts explain what preload does. All links mentioned in posts that refer to the openSUSE Wiki are dead.
Can you enlighten us mortal souls with a basic explanation what preload does and why it is installed/enabled by default?
Alright, that settles it then for me: it sounds very much like an optional feature that is supposed to make life easier which - unfortunately - on my system makes life harder. Enough said.
Last nag: is boot time really still such an issue with systems like 11.3/11.4 that we need apps like preload? My laptop (without preload) boots in 15-20 seconds, if that. It takes 5 minutes for my Blackberry to reboot.